Songbird is a new open-source music player that has this week landed at 1.0. Songbird is described as a "web player"- a music player for this modern, connected era. It blends the web-rendering core of Firefox (Gecko), with the media capabilities of GStreamer- a cross-platform, open-source media playback engine.

You miss the point entirely with your snide remark, my point was that iTunes development has taken course over a period of nearly 8 years, and you are expecting a fresh 1.0 release of this relatively new music player to stack up to its feature set. Do not pretend that you were reviewing it purely on the basis of "Hmmm, seems to play back the audio, we're done here!"

I'm curious, what music formats did you have problems with in Songbird? It supports far more than your preferred iTunes. This is relevant because of this: "With the QuickTime Playback and Window Media Playback add-ons installed, Songbird can play all the popular music formats including MPEG Audio (mpga), MPEG Layer 3 (mp3), MPEG4 family including FairPlay (m4a, m4v, mp4, m4p, m4b), Ogg Vorbis, Speex, AAC, WMA, WMADRM, FLAC, and less important: LPCM, ADPCM, AMR. If you're a developer, teach Songbird how to play your favorite format!" source: http://getsatisfaction.com/songbird/topics/what_digital_music_forma... Again, which format are you having difficulty playing back? If your gripe is with the program itself having shortcomings, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever for you to even mention ideals lying with open formats, the point is irrelevant to the discussion because those are not the only ones Songbird supports.

Granted.

Criticisms of iTunes are not relevant to this discussion, the only reason I bring up how far along iTunes has come since 1.0 is to illustrate the point to you that development takes time and energy and community interest.

You did not expect it to play music, you expected it to do things that it never said it was meant to do, most notably video playback.

I have no idea how your Songbird both imported a video file and then proceeded to actually display it in your library listing. For one, there are no tags that I'm aware of to attach to a video file to display Artist, Album, Title. How did you find the video file in your playlist? I tried importing a folder full of avi/mpg videos and Songbird quietly did nothing because Import Media was never meant to process video files. You're not that hung up on their usage of the word "Media" instead of "Music" are you?

I don't remember ever mentioning anything about a store, and I personally couldn't care less for an integrated store in a jukebox app, though I guess some people might find that to be a nice feature if they purchase music so regularly.

You are being intellectually dishonest by proclaiming Songbird is not ready for widespread usage because it didn't work perfectly for you on your Mac. I'll say it again, you are a niche market, there are many more people than you who are using a platform where Songbird has gotten more TLC. You know how you can make it better on your platform? By becoming involved. But if you'd rather keep using iTunes, that's fine too, just don't expect the world when developers only have so much time and so many systems to test on.

I find it amazing you continue to fly the flag of "Songbird is not functioning correctly!" when the fact of the matter is, for well over 90% of the potential market it has, it is functioning just fine. Stop pretending your Mac problems are indicative of the software on the whole.